You can go ahead and laugh. It was the only picture I could find quickly that had our old house in it.
That’s me waiting for the school bus.
In S’mee’s post on dying Easter eggs with natural ingredients (which is really cool, you should check it out), someone commented about having chickens. It reminded me of the chickens we used to have.
We lived on two acres in a suburb of Seattle, in an old farmhouse, with a barn, and some other outbuildings (carport, root cellar). It wasn’t a working farm where we grew crops, but we did occasionally have livestock. No cows—my dad was raised having to milk cows and he vowed never to have a milk cow again. My dad did plant raspberries one year, and I ran a U-pick raspberry field in our back yard one summer. (Boringest summer of my life.) We also had U-pick strawberry fields, but my dad rented farmland in the valley for that.
So what did we have? We had chickens. They were cute when they were chicks—I think we had about a dozen or two? They were stinky and mean when they grew up. I hated gathering the eggs and I don’t think I did it more than once—too afraid of getting pecked. They came to a sad end when we went to our grandparents’ for a weekend and returned to find them all gone, and only feathers all over the yard. And some kind of large animal paw prints all over the chicken coop.
We also had sheep. I think we had 3 or 4. My mom got into spinning wool (she still has a spinning wheel or two). I used to do it, too. It’s fun. Sheep are stupid, though. One time they got loose and went up the hill and gorged themselves on raspberry bushes. One died from overeating.
At some point we had pigs. Two were ours and two belonged to a family from Laos that we knew. My dad had ours sent out to be butchered. I think the Laotian family butchered their own. I remember going over to their apartment and the daughter told me to look in a big black garbage bag on the kitchen floor. So I peeked inside to find a severed pig’s head looking up at me.
I remember naming the pigs and trying to become sentimental about them but honestly, they weren’t much fun so I never got attached to them.
We also butchered some of the chickens. I spent most of that afternoon at a friend’s house. My dad chopped off the chickens’ heads, but the Laotians would slit their neck and then drain the blood into a bowl. They ate the chicken head. (I had dinner elsewhere that night.) They put the blood in our freezer. I could never tell if they were joking about stuff like that or not. (They also used to pick and cook dandelion weeds.)
My grandparents bought us a pony once. What little girl doesn’t want a pony? Problem was, I was scared of horses. First time I got on it, it bucked me off. I don’t remember having it for very long.
I think of all the farm animals, the goat was the worst. It wasn’t even ours—my dad knew someone who asked us to watch it for a week or two. That thing could get loose from anything. It was always running off. I’d have to babysit it constantly. My dad finally tied it up with wire because it wouldn’t be able to chew it’s way loose, but the stupid thing would get tangled up in it and I’d have to go unwind the wire from around it’s ankles—which wasn’t easy. My mom laughs because she can remember coming home one day to find me sitting in the yard next to the goat, reading a book. That thing was a menace.
